ENHANCING DESTINY

After a long walk, you feel tired and decide to sit in a café for a cup of coffee to relieve your exhaustion. Your coffee arrives. Delicious… It’s autumn, the air is a bit chilly but humid. The sun is setting, and the orange color dominates the horizon, reflected on the sea. Seagulls are competing with each other, trying to grab the pieces of simit thrown by people. The child sitting at the front table is blocking your view. The child is uninterested, and the mother is insisting that he eats. This insistence ends with the child crying and the mother angrily shouting.

Did you notice how many stimuli are present in the environment? Just like in our lives. Different intensities of sounds, smells, temperatures, humidity, various shapes, and colors at different frequencies…

Besides the external environment, there is also the internal environment. A body working smoothly, a wonderful system inside.

Both external and internal stimuli are constantly being sent to our brain, but are we aware of all of them? The way our internal organs work, how our heart beats, the contraction level of the muscle in our leg while sitting, our position in space, the pH level of our stomach, any pain in our body, the invasion of germs…

Among all these stimuli, how much of it are we aware of? For instance, can we perceive the fabric of the t-shirt touching our back right now? Or the hair strand falling from our head to our shoulder, or the sound of the wind outside? Right now, just like I illustrated in the beginning, there are millions of stimuli around us heading towards our brain, and for the brain, they are all the same.

But we consciously perceive only a very small amount of these stimuli. I think you are focused on reading these lines right now despite everything around you. Maybe there’s a TV program playing loudly or children screaming and playing beside you. Despite these distractions, your attention is here, and you are reading this text. Or let me give you another example. You went to pick up your child from school. You met with the teacher, and despite all the noise, you’re having a conversation with the teacher about your child. Have you ever thought about how your brain selects and focuses on the teacher’s voice and image among all the other stimuli? Even though the sounds of other children and the teacher’s voice are essentially the same for the brain? For the brain, sound is just sound, and image is just image. It processes the incoming information in the same way and does what is necessary.

Here, I will talk about the system that filters out the most important stimuli for us and allows us to focus on them, despite all the surrounding stimuli, and the significance of this system in our lives and even in our fortunes.

Reticular Activating System (RAS):

The Reticular Activating System is a well-functioning system located in the brainstem. As shown in the image below, information from our eyes, ears, and all our senses goes to this system.

The RAS filters these millions of incoming pieces of information for us! It then sends it to the higher brain for evaluation. In short, it plays an important role in how we perceive and what we focus on. The important part here is the filtering, because this part is connected to the mind and the beliefs we hold in our minds.

We load many beliefs into our minds, consciously or often unconsciously. “I am lucky,” “I am poor,” “Money will never come to me,” “Money slips through my fingers,” “Life is very hard,” “I am always struggling,” and so on. These beliefs can be about ourselves, our surroundings, or people around us. These beliefs determine our awareness and the way we perceive things, guiding what we focus on among all the stimuli. In fact, just like any other thought, the belief “I am unlucky” is essentially no different from the thought “I am going to have Iskender for dinner.” But imagine, in the example with the teacher, the mind focuses on the teacher’s voice among the noise, and when the thought of being unlucky arises, the mind focuses on it and processes it. It makes us experience the result.

Let’s go through an example. In childhood or adulthood, you might have thought that no one loves you, that you are unloved. This thought is normal because the mind can have all kinds of thoughts. But eventually, you started to connect your experiences to this thought. For example, your friend didn’t meet you, or you said “good morning” to someone, but they didn’t respond. You continued to connect these events to the thought of being unloved, either consciously or unconsciously. What happened? Every time you did this, you strengthened the belief that you are unloved. You recorded this in your RAS. Thus, your thought turned into a belief, and it began to move with emotion. At the same time, your mind became a receiver.

Thus, your mind started filtering and breaking down the whole situation. You began to see events and situations that supported the idea of being unloved, just like how your mind selected the teacher’s voice in the previous example.

Now, let’s see how RAS opens our destiny:

Let’s use the example of being unloved again. You are a tailor, you are unemployed, you’re looking for a job, and you think people are not giving you a job because you are unloved. Over time, you neutralize the belief of being unloved by thinking something like “those who love will love, those who don’t, won’t.” Your belief registered in RAS changes. The filter that made you see events supporting the idea of being unloved disappears, and you start seeing events as they are.

Since your mind removes the filter, your vision widens. Positive thoughts like “why shouldn’t people come to me?” start entering your awareness. The brain processes these thoughts and leads you to make the decision to create your own opportunities. With an increase in your belief in yourself, success, the inevitable result, finds you naturally.

We close our own fortune with our own beliefs. Please realize this. The easiest way to change beliefs formed due to past experiences is to see and experience contrary examples in life. This will expand our perception, and everything will naturally unfold after that.

Emine NALÇACI MAVİŞ